Well, honestly, to say that my (x)html & css is rusty is to do an injustice to all things rusty... the last time I really played with html was the before the .com boom, and the last time I played with css was in 2000 when the css hover directive wasn't supported by IE... Oh, wait, what's that? Even today with IE7 the hover tag still is cranky?? (see Getting :hover to Work in IE7) ... Phew, and I thought everything I knew had changed!
So I talked to a couple of coworkers asking for recommendations on how to quickly come up to speed on what's happened since I last visited the land of web development. My coworkers confirmed that any Xhtml & Css classes I tried to take would likely put me to sleep, and also sadly conveyed the knowledge that any books I picked up might be useful as a reference but probably wouldn't be relevant enough to give me the whole picture. The fact of the matter is that most classes and subject books are given for the absolute beginner and assume no prior knowledge of the subject... which makes complete sense given that other than absolute beginners there's no way of knowing exactly how much the target market for your book already knows... which makes it difficult to write the book in the first place.
That rambling paragraph brings me to where I stand now: classes are out and books are out... which only leaves 'ol fashioned diving in and figuring it out using whatever resources I can find on the web. (Isn't that always the answer?) So I decided not to worry about what I didn't know until it got in my way and instead dove head first into my new work project: adding a new asp.net aspx page reusing some existing controls and creating a new control. Simple enough, some copy here, some paste there... then BLAMO- about 2 hours in I found what I needed: a problem involving css which I had no clue how to solve. Necessity being the mother of invention... ok, well, not invention, but at least a google search to find who already invented my solution and I ended up at a nifty little resource called http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssintermediate/. There it was... a fast loading well designed website with just enough information on each page to keep me clicking without going so far into mundane detail I'd lose interest... well, to be honest I guess I did lose interest for at least long enough to pump out this blog entry... but suffice it to say that I'll be back there soon...
And whadya know... they sell a book ;)
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Dennis, you have pegged one of the problems with writing for technology - it all changes so fast (or not!) that it is tough to keep anything fresh, other than what is on the web. Looks like you found a few good links, though, and I may even pass them on to some of my techie friends!
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